Entropy morning

I’ve had cause to think just a little about entropy in the last week and though it’s not time to say more about that right now, it is worth linking to the recent adverti-view Stephen Colbert carried out with Sean Carroll for the latter’s new book. It’s something I will, perhaps, get around to reading someday soon, but there is no rush because Sean has been running a chapter-by-chapter book club on Cosmic Variance, which is a great resource to have on the digital shelf.

This is a good place to mention the publication of O. J. E. Maroney’s 2007 paper ‘Does a Computer Have an Arrow of Time?'; apparently the lag time for publication is quite long in the philosophy of physics. The purpose of this article is to advance the idea that

… [A]ny computational process that can take place in an entropy increasing universe, can equally take place in an entropy decreasing universe.

However,

This conclusion does not automatically imply a psychological arrow can run counter to the thermodynamic arrow.

No. I will not settle for absolute security. I require, I demand the […] Government guarantee a negative probability of anything bad ever occurring to me. I demand that the chances of my not suffering from any external danger exceed unity. I order civilization to hack the seething quantum foundation of spacetime itself.

Maybe we should do a book club. Ignoring the fact that none of us (bloggers, readers, spambots) are really willing to commit time to it, what would be a good book for that sort of venture?